An Oklahoma woman has been fined after boasting about illegally killing a "bigo buck" while speaking to a man on a dating app who, unfortunately for her, just happened to be a state game warden.
Cannon Harrison, of the Oklahoma's Department of Wildlife Conservation, started talking to the woman via the app Bumble, initially making small talk and enquiring how she is.
The woman, whose name has not been made public by the department, then told the 24-year-old how she had just killed a deer and was "pretty happy about it."
Harrison asked whether she had "get em with a bow?"—which would have been a legal method of killing the deer as the season in which licensed residents could hunt with rifles had ended at the time of the conversation, notes Tulsa World.
"Well we don't need to talk about that," the woman replied.
Harrison then asked if the woman had been "spotlighting"—a term for an act illegal in Oklahoma, where hunters shine a bright light in an animal's eyes in order to make them freeze.
The woman admitted to the warden to "spotlighting" the deer at her ranch, before sharing photos of her posing with the dead animal, as well as ones showing its decapitated head and torso, all of which the Oklahoma Game Wardens later posted on Facebook.
"Honestly, the first thing I thought was that it was someone who was messing with me because they knew who I was," Harrison told The Washington Post. "It seemed too good to be true."
Harrison used the information he had on the woman via the dating app to track her down on social media. Game wardens arrived at her home the following morning to question her.
The woman and a male accomplice who helped her take the buck's head home after the killing were fined $2,400 after pleading guilty to improper possession of an illegally taken animal and taking game out-of-season.
She avoided charges of wanton waste of mean and spotlighting and will not serve any jail time after paying the fine.
"A case like this, on a dating app, probably won't happen again," Bill Hale, Law Enforcement Division chief, told Tulsa World. "A person connecting on a dating app that happens to be a violator in the process of a violation and it happens that other person is a game warden? The odds of that happening are probably less than winning the lottery."
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